Undertone Online Ads Actually More Effective than Multi-Million Dollar Super Bowl TV Ad Campaigns

System1-Measured Ad Performance Achieved 3.5 Times the Effectiveness of Game Day Ads

Perion Network Ltd. announced that Undertone, a leader in cross-platform synchronized digital branding for the world’s most prominent brands, unveiled the measurement results by System1 Research, a respected research organization and an Undertone partner. These results demonstrated Undertone’s measured online ad creative achieved higher year-round levels of performance versus most of the high-profile TV ads that ran during Super Bowl LIII.

@AccessUndertone’s online ads are ranked 3.5 times more effective by @System1 than Super Bowl LIII TV ad campaigns

Ranking all 80 ads that aired during this year’s game, System1 found just 17 percent of Super Bowl ads scored 4 to 5-stars on their scale of emotional effectiveness, while over 60 percent of Undertone’s ad inventory from the past two years achieved those top ratings.

System1 measures a campaign’s emotional effectiveness by asking an online panel of consumers to identify the types and intensity of their emotional experience while viewing. Built around Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning theories of behavioral economics, System1 helps brands collect fast, instinctive, and emotional consumer responses. System1’s Live Ad Ratings Table ranked each Super Bowl ad that ran this year; just a few campaigns struck a chord with audiences (Microsoft’s “We All Win” and the NFL’s “Get Ready for 100”), but many of the ads did not resonate with consumers.

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“We’re thrilled with how well Undertone’s work performed against the ads at the behemoth marketing event that is the Super Bowl,” said Laura Salant, Senior Director of Research & Insights at Undertone. “The game is one of the biggest platforms of the year for brands to run their most innovative creative spots. Even with that anticipation, when measured against two year’s-worth of Undertone’s creative, our ads performed consistently better, and yielded a higher overall rate of emotional effectiveness. While many believe that television is the ultimate channel for delivering emotionally affecting campaigns to consumers, these results once again show that digital—when executed creatively and persuasively as Undertone can—is truly the way forward.”

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“Behavioral science tells us that emotion drives long-term effectiveness in creative—and as the best TV ads still prove, the most emotional medium has generally been video,” said Tom Ewing, Head of Marketing at System1. “That’s why it’s so exciting that Undertone has been able to shake that up, with their highly emotional digital formats. Their mix of engagement and interaction is a brilliant solution to the problem of how to ensure your digital advertising is contributing to your long-term brand ambitions.”

Undertone incorporates System1’s award-winning methodology for measuring and assessing creative campaigns as part of its ongoing evaluative processes. Independently validated by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising as predictive of long-term brand growth, System1 measures emotional responses to ads with a star rating classification of 1 to 5-stars. Typically, this methodology finds few ads that measure 5-stars (about 1%), but 5% of Super Bowl LIII’s ads achieved 5-star ratings. Undertone uses this intelligence to help clients optimize ad creative and develop creative best practices.

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